Stylometric analysis of Satoshi Nakamoto

Everyone’s talking about that New York Times article “unmasking” Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous developer of Bitcoin. Or at least they were when I started writing the draft of this post a little over a month ago, after listening to the related interview on The Daily podcast.

In short, investigative journalist John Carreyrou of Theranos fame purports to be 99.5–100% certain of his identification of Satoshi based primarily on stylometric analysis and a timeline of events (plus other circumstantial evidence) which admittedly lines up pretty well.

I am skeptical of the ability of stylometry analysis to bring anyone to the level of certainty Carreyrou claims for his identification. (But maybe I shouldn’t be, given the apparent power of LLMs to unmask individuals online.) There are many approaches, and different ones inevitably lead to different results. Carreyrou himself reckons with this in his article, facing early disappointments in his investigation when a series of stylometric analyses appeared to favour another candidate.

Another problem is the major unstated assumption that every stylometric analysis on this topic relies on: that the entire Satoshi corpus has a single author. This assumption is challenged by those who believe “Satoshi” was a pseudonym used by a group, with different members authoring (or collaborating on) different components (e.g., the forum posts, emails, code, and white paper).

To his credit, Carreyrou does mention this objection before dismissing it:

Some have speculated that Bitcoin wasn’t created by one person but by a group of individuals. I didn’t buy that theory, either. The more people you let in on a secret, the likelier it is to leak. Satoshi’s secret had remained airtight for 17 years.

Occam’s razor, fine. But I still believe there are several candidates where you can more-or-less line up the timeline and drum up a stylometric analysis to support your theory.

As an aside, as amusing a diversion as the hunt for the elusive Mr. Bitcoin is, I’m not sure we’ve given enough consideration to the ethics of this hunt. After all, Satoshi’s wallets control something like $85 billion USD of Bitcoin at current prices. Carreyrou’s suspect regularly attends public conferences and is very susceptible to a wrench attack. Does this article just paint a giant target on his back? Is revealing the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto in the public interest? I mean, yeah, probably, but it’s worth thinking about.

Of course, crypto is a much more centralized ecosystem than its proponents like to admit, so converting any meaningful fraction of Satoshi’s coins into real money would be very difficult in practice. But your average smash-kneecaps-and-grab extortionist might not know that.

As a more fun aside, language-obsessed journalist Joe Weisenthal (whose Havelock orality analyzer we have discussed before) vibe coded Satlock, which computes the similarity of a piece of text to Satoshi’s writing style.